Oonagh van den Berg Joins Tangos as Chief Evangelist
She has spent twenty years being sold compliance technology that could not do what it claimed. She says she checked this one before she joined.
TEL AVIV, [DATE]. TangosAI (“Tangos”), an autonomous investigation model for risk and compliance, today announced that Oonagh van den Berg has joined the company as Chief Evangelist.
Van den Berg is not an obvious hire for an AI company. She has spent two decades inside compliance functions and, more recently, has built a following of more than 40,000 by saying in public what most practitioners say privately: that a great deal of what this industry sells does not yet exist, and that layering AI over fragmented data and weak controls does not fix anything. In her words, it “will simply give the existing problem a more sophisticated interface.”
She applied the same test before accepting the role.
“I have spent twenty years in rooms where this industry sells technology it does not actually have,” said van den Berg. “Tangos is the first organisation I have seen that actually has the technology to do what it says it can do. That is the entire reason I am here.”
Her second reason is about who builds it.
“A lot of technology companies in this space made the same mistake,” she said. “They brought in old timers from the financial institutions, and the whole thing stopped being fresh. Not just the technology. The language went backwards too. Tangos has not evolved into this landscape. It was built for the landscape we are in now.”
Van den Berg held in-house compliance roles at HSBC and Citi before moving into fintech and digital assets. Her career began in law, with a legal traineeship at the European Central Bank’s DG Legal in Frankfurt. In 2015 she founded Virtual Risk Solutions, a practitioner-led risk and governance advisory firm. In 2020 she founded RAW Compliance, a social enterprise delivering free, practitioner-led training to compliance professionals worldwide.
She is the author of the Modernising Compliance book series, hosts The Compliance Word podcast, co-hosts the Rogue Trader Podcast with Nick Leeson, and guest lectures at Northumbria University and the School of International Financial Services.
“We did not hire for headcount. We hired for judgment,” said Eyal Azoulay, Chief Executive Officer of Tangos. “Oonagh has spent twenty years building compliance frameworks and then standing behind them when someone asked her to prove they worked. She did not join because she liked the pitch. She checked whether the technology did what we say it does. That is the standard we want held against our work.”
Detection technology has improved steadily for a decade. The investigation behind every escalated case has not. Tangos operates at that gap, performing full investigations from alert to resolution and delivering examiner-ready case files in which every conclusion is source-traced and auditable. Van den Berg describes the model as complementary rather than a replacement for existing compliance infrastructure. “You have a system. You have a process. You have people doing things. We plug into that. It is always on top. It is never instead.”
As Chief Evangelist, van den Berg is one of the people who carries Tangos’s public case in the compliance industry. She has already written the company’s first research report, Financial Crime Trends and Threats 2026, and will also write its follow-up, a 2027 predictions report, alongside the kind of practitioner-facing analysis that built her following of more than 40,000. The mandate is also a constraint: she spent two years telling the industry, in public, that vendors sell compliance technology they do not have, and her job at Tangos is to hold the company to that same test, in public, from now on.
About TangosAI (“Tangos”)
Tangos is an autonomous investigation model for risk and compliance. It performs full investigations from alert to resolution. The model forms hypotheses, gathers evidence across jurisdictions and languages, documents every reasoning step, and delivers examiner-ready case files. Tangos operates where the real bottleneck is: not detection, but the L2/L3 investigation itself. Every conclusion is source-traced and auditable. Every output is built for examiners and regulators, not dashboards. Financial institutions and government agencies use Tangos to resolve investigations in hours, not weeks, and to scale expertise without adding headcount.
Learn more at tangos.ai.
